Top 50 Product Led Growth (PLG) companies in Europe

Understanding the SaaS market however is challenging – there is no one good definition of SaaS, and within SaaS there are also a few flavors.

Compiling data on this market is interesting to B2B companies, investment firms, and venture capital companies. Because SaaS companies typically copy each other’s operating models and tech stacks, figuring out a repeatable motion to sell to SaaS companies is very lucrative. On the other hand, they are also one of the fastest growing and highest margin business models around, which makes it of interest to investment firms and venture capital.

Source

In this analysis, we looked at 3,000 companies that are a) over 100 people, b) headquartered in Europe, c) founded after 2005 and d) have received some sort of funding. The funding will predominantly be venture/growth funding, although grants, debt and other types of funding is also counted.

What is Software as a Service?

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software application hosted by a third-party provider (the vendor) and made available to customers over the internet. SaaS products are usually used through a web browser, and the vendor is responsible for maintaining and updating the software, as well as hosting and managing the infrastructure needed to run it.

Typically, customers pay for SaaS with a monthly or annual subscription, and the vendor charges based on the number of users or the level of service provided.

Examples of include customer relationship management (CRM) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools.

In terms of go-to-market, we divide this into the popular go-to-markets in SaaS – product led growth (PLG) and sales led growth (also known as ‘enterprise sales’).

What is product led growth?

Product-led growth (PLG) is a business model and go-to-market strategy that uses the product to market itself, acquire, expand, and retain customers. The goal is to create a compelling product experience that drives organic growth through word-of-mouth and referrals.

There are several key characteristics of a product-led growth model:

• The product is the marketing: free trials, freemium models, or self-service onboarding.
• The product drives acquisition and retention, using concepts like viral loops, referral programs, or customer loyalty programs.

Concretely, we used Tactic to get answers around the following 3 questions to understand if there is a PLG model:

1. Is there a self service sign in portal?
2. Is there a free trial/tier?
3. Is there a pricing page on the company website?
4. Is there a growth team?

Data

Here's the first 50 companies in this dataset. If you'd like to ask additional questions (e.g. who has monthly pricing?), integrate this into your CRM, or access the rest of the dataset, please contact us for a chat!